Ever wanted to be in charge? Well, in my own little world I will be, one day. Just not quite yet. I'm a bit tired at the moment... maybe I'll take over after I've had my little nap.
The United Dingdom - stating the bleeding obvious so you don't have to.
(Sign up to get updates direct to email or follow @Battsby on Twitter)

Pages

Thursday, 17 March 2016

PAT Syndrome

Remember your PIN Number? You know, your ‘personal
identification number number’? The redundant ‘number’ is echoed in several
other popular nomenclatures such as TSB Savings Bank, ATM Machine and LCD Display.
The phenomenon is popularly referred to as RAS Syndrome, which stands for Redundant Acronym Syndrome
Syndrome or, more playfully , PNS syndrome ("PIN number syndrome
syndrome", or "personal identification number number syndrome
syndrome") What larks!

Anyway today I am embarked upon teaching PAT Testing, which
some of you may be aware is Portable Appliance Testing, er... testing and a
more redundant activity you would be hard pushed to find. Actually, scratch
that, the public sector is brim full with entire occupations, whole careers,
less useful; at least PAT Testing has at its heart a desire to save lives. And
we can thank the good old Health & Safety at Work ct, 1974. The fact that
we joined ‘the group which called itself’ The Common Market the year before is
mere coincidence ( or is it it).

The principle is very simple – electrical equipment, with
a plug on the end of it or not, has to be safe. If it gives you a tingle,
shocks the life out of you, or burns down your premises, it’s a wrong ‘un. But how
to spot these cuckoos in the nest, these electrical fifth columnists? Here’s
the thing, it’s mostly common sense. The clues are all there if you care to
look. Bare wires sticking out of things, brass terminals you can get your
fingers on, damaged flexes and so forth, plus the smoke billowing from the plugtop are all reliable
indicators. But hey, a new kettle might cost a tenner so best use the old one
to destruction; just don’t touch it until you’ve unplugged it and you’ll be
fine.

As with so many bits of legislation, health and safety
suffers from the natural law of unintended consequences. What is a perfectly
reasonable practice that anybody can carry out – check it out before you use
the thing – has been elevated to something only a bona fide qualified professional
can carry out and many companies pay for unscrupulous ticket-holders to turn up
every year and stick stickers on top of stickers. Check your appliances at work
– if there is a sticker on telling you when the next ‘test’ is due, then it’s
already out of date. There is no longer any requirement to state this advice
and those stickers themselves are some four years out of date.

See, like so many other areas, the codes of practice are
made to seem so complex and updated so regularly that only a trained pro could
possibly know what to do and how to do it. In reality, folks, the people
sticking on those stickers are little more than label-monkeys. If those labels
are still dated, by the way, and are recent, then the ‘testers’ are probably using
up old stock and are unaware that the code of practice has changed. Or else the
printers are still churning out the old stuff and nobody’s informed them. There’s
a lot of that about. The blind, leading the uncertain, informed by the barely
competent.

Dispose of old stock responsibly

The world of electrical safety is suffused with a rudimentary
grasp of the principles and a general ignorance of the regulations, but those
driving vans marked with the logos of supposed monitoring bodies have the air
of respectability and competence. This is much like the debate over Europe and
the EU. Almost none of ‘the facts’ you are being told about our membership is
true just because a professional politician tells you it is. And as for that EU
symbol you see all over the place? Only 12 stars? It’s well out of date; you
need that testing, mate.

1 comment:

The EU is out of date of course. Globalisation is now coming off the printing press and more decision making is done at world level. Perhaps nobody has told Brussels that they are now old hat and irrelevant or maybe they are ignoring it and hoping that it will go away. Just like they do with everything else. It's called can kicking I believe.

Of course all that means is that more bossy boots are telling us what to do. Perhaps we should tell them that is us who should be telling them what to do. Oh we do from time to time either by visiting a polling booth and even shooting at them when they become to uppity. However it does not take them long to get back to their old ways and the cycle starts all over again.